Faculty Publications

Since its initial publication in 2003, Documentary Storytelling has reached filmmakers and filmgoers worldwide with its unique focus on the most important and cost-effective tool of nonfiction filmmaking: storytelling. This practical guide reveals how today’s top filmmakers bring the tools of narrative cinema to the world of nonfiction film and video without sacrificing the rigor and truthfulness that give documentaries their power.The book offers practical advice for producers, directors, editors, cinematographers, writers and others seeking to make ethical and effective films that merge the strengths of visual and aural media with the power of narrative storytelling. Translations are available in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Polish and Portuguese.

In this new, updated edition, Emmy Award-winning author Sheila Curran Bernard offer new strategies for analyzing and understanding documentary work and new conversations with filmmakers including Stanley Nelson (The Black Panthers), Kazuhiro Soda (Mental), Orlando von Einsiedel (Virunga), and Cara Mertes (JustFilms), along with those previously held with Susan Kim (Imaginary Witness), Deborah Scranton (The War Tapes), Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), and James Marsh (Man on Wire).

Iris
Berger
Cambridge University Press, 2016
During a turbulent colonial and postcolonial century, African women struggled to control their own marital, sexual and economic lives and to gain a significant voice in local and national politics. This book introduces students to many remarkable women, who organized religious and political movements, fought in anti-colonial wars, ran away to escape arranged marriages, and during the 1990s began successful campaigns for gender parity in national legislatures. The book also explores the apparent paradox in the conflicting images of African women - as singularly oppressed and dominated by men, but also as strong, resourceful, and willing to challenge governments and local traditions to protect themselves and their families. Understanding the tension between women's power and their oppression, between their strength and their vulnerability, offers a new lens for understanding the relationship between the state and society in the twentieth century.

Iris Berger,
Ed., et al.
Ohio University Press, 2015
African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights examines the emerging trend of requests for expert opinions in asylum hearings or refugee status determinations. This is the first book to explore the role of court-based expertise in relation to African asylum cases and the first to establish a rigorous analytical framework for interpreting the effects of this new reliance on expert testimony.

Over the past two decades, courts in Western countries and beyond have begun demanding expert reports tailored to the experience of the individual claimant. As courts increasingly draw upon such testimony in their deliberations, expertise in matters of asylum and refugee status is emerging as an academic area with its own standards, protocols, and guidelines. This deeply thoughtful book explores these developments and their effects on both asylum seekers and the experts whose influence may determine their fate.

The founding of la Villa Rica de la Veracruz (the rich town of the True Cross) is prominently mentioned in histories of the conquest of Mexico, but scant primary documentation of the provocative act exists. During a research session at the Spanish archives, when John Schwaller discovered an early-sixteenth-century letter from Veracruz signed by the members of Cortés’s company, he knew he had found a trove of historical details. Providing an accessible, accurate translation of this pivotal correspondence, along with in-depth examinations of its context and significance, The First Letter from New Spain gives all readers access to the first document written from the mainland of North America by any European, and the only surviving original document from the first months of the conquest.

The timing of Cortés’s Good Friday landing, immediately before the initial assault on the Aztec Empire, enhances the significance of this work. Though the expedition was conducted under the authority of Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba, the letter reflects an attempt to break ties with Velázquez and form a strategic alliance with Carlos V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. Brimming with details about the events surrounding Veracruz’s inception and accompanied by mini-biographies of 318 signers of the document—socially competitive men who risked charges of treason by renouncing Velázquez—The First Letter from New Spain gives evidence of entrepreneurship and other overlooked traits that fueled the conquest.

One of the largest estuaries on the North Atlantic coast, Narragansett Bay served as a gateway for colonial expansion in the seventeenth century and the birthplace of American industrialization in the late eighteenth. Christopher Pastore presents an environmental history of this watery corner of the Atlantic world, beginning with the first European settlement in 1636 and ending with the dissolution of the Blackstone Canal Company in 1849. Between Land and Sea traces how the Bay’s complex ecology shaped the contours of European habitation, trade, and resource use, and how littoral settlers in turn reconfigured the physical and cultural boundaries between humans and nature.

Narragansett Bay emerges in Pastore’s account as much more than a geological formation. Rather, he reimagines the nexus of land and sea as a brackish borderland shaped by the tension between what English settlers saw as improvable land and the perpetual forces of the North Atlantic Ocean. By draining swamps, damming rivers, and digging canals, settlers transformed a marshy coastal margin into a clearly defined edge. The resultant “coastline” proved less resilient, less able to absorb the blows of human initiative and natural variation than the soggy fractal of water and earth it replaced.

Today, as sea levels rise and superstorms batter coasts with increasing ferocity, Between Land and Sea calls on the environmentally-minded to make a space in their notions of progress for impermanence and uncertainty in the natural world.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century Byzantium was still one of the most influential states in the eastern Mediterranean, possessing two-thirds of the Balkans and almost half of Asia Minor. After the capture of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, the most prominent and successful of the Greek rump states was the Empire of Nicaea, which managed to re-capture the city in 1261 and restore Byzantium. The Nicaean Empire, like Byzantium of the Komnenoi and Angeloi of the twelfth century, went on to gain dominant influence over the Seljukid Sultanate of Rum in the 1250s. However, the decline of the Seljuk power, the continuing migration of Turks from the east, and what effectively amounted to a lack of Mongol interest in western Anatolia, allowed the creation of powerful Turkish nomadic confederations in the frontier regions facing Byzantium. By 1304, the nomadic Turks had broken Byzantium's eastern defences; the Empire lost its Asian territories forever, and Constantinople became the most eastern outpost of Byzantium. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Empire was a tiny, second-ranking Balkan state, whose lands were often disputed between the Bulgarians, the Serbs, and the Franks.

Using Greek, Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman sources, Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century presents a new interpretation of the Nicaean Empire and highlights the evidence for its wealth and power. It explains the importance of the relations between the Byzantines and the Seljuks and the Mongols, revealing how the Byzantines adapted to the new and complex situation that emerged in the second half of the thirteenth century. Finally, it turns to the Empire's Anatolian frontiers and the emergence of the Turkish confederations, the biggest challenge that the Byzantines faced in the thirteenth century.

Americans have never been more concerned about their food's purity. The organic trade association claims that three-quarters of all consumers buy organic foods each year, spending billions of dollars.

"Dairy farm families, health officials, and food manufacturers have simultaneously stoked human desires for an all-natural product and intervened to ensure milk's safety and profitability," writes Kendra Smith-Howard. In Pure and Modern Milk, she tells the history of a nearly universal consumer product, and sheds light on America's food industry. Today, she notes, milk reaches supermarkets in an entirely different state than it had at its creation. Cows march into milking parlors, where tubes are attached to their teats, and the product of their lactation is mechanically pumped into tanks. Enormous, expensive machines pasteurize it, fortify it with vitamins, remove fat, and store it at government-regulated temperatures. It reaches consumers in a host of forms: as fluid milk, butter, ice cream, and in apparently non-dairy foods such as whey solids or milk proteins. Smith-Howard examines the cultural, political, and social context, discussing the attempts to reform the production and distribution of this once-perilous product in the Progressive Era, the history of butter between the world wars, dairy waste at mid-century, and the postwar landscape of mass production. She asks how milk could be conceptualized as a "natural" product, even as it has been incorporated into Cheez Whiz and wood glue. And she shows how consumer's changing expectations have had repercussions back down the chain, affecting farmers, cows, and rural landscapes.

A groundbreaking, interdisciplinary history, this book reveals the complexity and challenges of humanity's dependence on other species.

Writing more than one hundred years ago, African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois speculated that the great dilemma of the twentieth century would be the problem of "the color line." Nowhere was the dilemma of racial discrimination more entrenched-and more complex-than South Africa.

Gordian Knot examines South Africa's freedom struggle in the years surrounding African decolonization, using the global apartheid debate to explore the way new nation-states changed the international community during the mid-twentieth century. At the highpoint of decolonization, South Africa's problems shaped a transnational conversation about nationhood. Arguments about racial justice, which crested as Europe relinquished imperial control of Africa and the Caribbean, elided a deeper contest over the meaning of sovereignty, territoriality, and development.

Based on research in African, American, and European archives, Gordian Knot advances a bold new interpretation about African decolonization's relationship to American power. In so doing, it promises to shed light on U.S. foreign relations with the Third World and recast understandings of the fate of liberal internationalism after World War II.

Telegraphy in the nineteenth century approximated the internet in our own day. Historian and electrical engineer David Hochfelder offers readers a comprehensive history of this groundbreaking technology, which employs breaks in an electrical current to send code along miles of wire. The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920, examines the correlation between technological innovation and social change and shows how this transformative relationship helps us to understand and perhaps define modernity.

The telegraph revolutionized the spread of information―speeding personal messages, news of public events, and details of stock fluctuations. During the Civil War, telegraphed intelligence and high-level directives gave the Union war effort a critical advantage. Afterward, the telegraph helped build and break fortunes and, along with the railroad, altered the way Americans thought about time and space. Hochfelder thus supplies us with an introduction to the early stirrings of the information age.

Slavery by Another Name is a ninety-minute documentary that challenges the popular belief that slavery in the United States ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. Based on the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas A. Blackmon, the film, produced by tpt National Productions and Two Dollars and A Dream, tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality. It was a system in which individuals, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of overseers. Tolerated by both the North and South, forced labor lasted well into the twentieth century, until 1945.

Narrated by acclaimed actor Laurence Fishburne, Slavery by Another Name gives voice to the largely forgotten victims and perpetrators of forced labor and features their descendants living today. The program also includes interviews with Douglas A. Blackmon and scholars of this period, including Mary Ellen Curtin, Pete Daniel, Risa Goluboff, Adam Green, and Khalil Muhammad.

Major funding for Slavery by Another Name was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, The Coca-Cola Company, and the CPB/PBS Diversity and Innovation Fund. Additional funding was provided by Georgia-Pacific, KeyBank Foundation, and Merck; and by the omicron Member Boulé of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, Minneapolis; the General Mills Foundation; and Frances Wilkinson.

The experiment with neoliberal market-oriented economic policy in Latin America, popularly known as the Washington Consensus, has run its course. With left-wing and populist regimes now in power in many countries, there is much debate about what direction economic policy should be taking, and there are those who believe that state-led development might be worth trying again. Susan Gauss’s study of the process by which Mexico transformed from a largely agrarian society into an urban, industrialized one in the two decades following the end of the Revolution is especially timely and may have lessons to offer to policy makers today.

The image of a strong, centralized corporatist state led by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) from the 1940s conceals what was actually a prolonged, messy process of debate and negotiation among the postrevolutionary state, labor, and regionally based industrial elites to define the nationalist project. Made in Mexico focuses on the distinctive nature of what happened in the four regions studied in detail: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey, and Puebla. It shows how industrialism enabled recalcitrant elites to maintain a regionally grounded preserve of local authority outside of formal ruling-party institutions, balancing the tensions among centralization, consolidation of growth, and Mexico’s deep legacies of regional authority.

One cannot understand Latin America without understanding the history of the Catholic Church in the region. Catholicism has been predominant in Latin America and it has played a definitive role in its development. It helped to spur the conquest of the New World with its emphasis on missions to the indigenous peoples, controlled many aspects of the colonial economy, and played key roles in the struggles for Independence. The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America offers a concise yet far-reaching synthesis of this institution’s role from the earliest contact between the Spanish and native tribes until the modern day, the first such historical overview available in English.

John Frederick Schwaller looks broadly at the forces which formed the Church in Latin America and which caused it to develop in the unique manner in which it did. While the Church is often characterized as monolithic, the author carefully showcases its constituent parts—often in tension with one another—as well as its economic function and its role in the political conflicts within the Latin America republics.

One of the most learned men of his day and called the philosopher by contemporaries, George Amiroutzes (c. 1400-c. 1469) attended the Council of Florence (1438-39) as a lay scholar in the Greek delegation. As a high government official in his native Trebizond, he helped to negotiate the surrender of this last independent Greek state to Mehmed the Conqueror in 1461. He eventually entered the Sultan's household as someone with whom Mehmed enjoyed having intellectual discussions. Despite his contemporary fame, however, almost no philosophical writings of his survive. The present work offers an edition of fifteen previously unknown philosophical tractates. Although they are unpublished drafts in a fragmentary state, the tractaes reveal Amiroutzes to be an Aristotelian philosopher influenced by Thomas Aquinas and firmly intent upon refuting Platonism. He also shows himself to be an original thinker in discussing ethics and metaphysics.

A rich narrative recounting the life story of award-winning African American historian and novelist Allen B. Ballard, Breaching Jericho's Walls takes its readers on an exciting journey from a segregated Philadelphia community in the 1930s to midcentury Paris, Moscow, Cambridge, and Manhattan. The author reflects on his own pioneering role as he expands his horizons as one of the first African American students attending Kenyon College in Ohio, studying abroad in France and sharing a café table with Richard Wright and James Baldwin, serving in the military in the American South, and attending graduate school at Harvard University.

As one of the nation's first black Russian specialists, Ballard studied in post-Stalinist Russia for a year, where, among other adventures, he spent a month with Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, on a Soviet farm. Though he tells his own personal story within Breaching Jericho's Walls, Ballard also portrays the experiences of those northern African Americans whose generations bridged the gap from the legacy of slavery to the breakdown of the segregated system in the 1950s and 1960s. Along the way, he reveals the crucial role that individuals like civil rights leader Paul Robeson, Olympic athletes Jesse Owens and "Long John" Woodruff, and scholar Alain Locke played in inspiring the hopes of an oppressed and downtrodden race. A memoir filled with entertaining anecdotes and insightful reflection, Breaching Jericho's Walls offers Ballard's compelling personal story and reveals how, brick by brick, African Americans built the road that led to the election of President Obama in 2008.

Allen
B.
Ballard
Seaforth Press, 2009
Returning home from his janitor’s job early one morning, Obie Bullock - leader of a Philadelphia anti-violence group - stumbles upon a crime scene: someone has just slit the throat of a police officer. Armed with the officer’s recovered revolver, Obie, an Iraq war vet, corners and kills the masked assassin, who turns out to be the youngest brother of a powerful, but imprisoned drug dealer. Demands for revenge follow, sparking the fast-paced action while simultaneously examining the lives of a working-class family struggling to survive in the projects of Philadelphia. Character-based, authentic, and gripping, this novel exposes the difficulties and danger of working to rid a neighborhood of drugs and violence so that future generations can grow up safe and secure.

Iris
Berger
Oxford University Press, 2009
This volume begins in the early centuries of the Common Era with the various groups of people who had settled in southern Africa. Stone Age foragers, farmers with iron technology, and pastoralists all interacted to create a complex society before Europeans arrived. In the seventeenth century, Dutch settlers developed a colonial society based on the menial labor of indigenous inhabitants of the Cape and slaves imported from the East Indies and other parts of Africa.

British conquest in the early nineteenth century brought an end to slavery, as well as new forms of colonial domination, tension between the British and the original Dutch settlers, armed struggle between expanding European communities and Africans (including the highly militarized Zulu kingdom), and intensive missionary activity that transformed many African societies. The discovery of diamonds and gold in the late nineteenth century brought industrialization based on migrant labor, new clashes between British and Africaaners, the final conquest of African societies, and new European migrants. During the twentieth-century, despite further economic development, African communities were increasingly impoverished. New forms of racial domination lead to the implementation of apartheid in 1948 and heightened political organizing among both African and Africaaner nationalists. The intensification of resistance in the 1970s and '80s coupled with drastic changes in the international balance of power brought an end to the apartheid state in 1994 and an intensified struggle to overcome apartheid's economic and political legacy by building a new nonracial society.

The book emphasizes social and cultural history, focusing on people's interactions and identities according to race, class, gender, religion and ethnicity. It also addresses changes in literature (both oral and written), music, and the arts and draws on the extensive biographical and autobiographical literature to provide a personal focus for the discussion of major themes. While this emphasis reflects dominant trends in historical scholarship for the past two decades, it also includes recent material on environmental history and relationships between African Americans and South Africans. Where relevant, it highlights comparisons between South African and U.S. history.

Intended for filmmakers in any genre -- as well as for public historians, archivists, and anyone who uses the sounds and images of the past century in their work -- this book is an essential, pragmatic guide. It features conversations with researchers in Sydney, Moscow, Toronto, and Washington, DC, and insight from filmmakers, music supervisors, intellectual property experts, insurance executives and others, including Geoffrey C. Ward, Lawrence Lessig, Hubert Best, Rick Prelinger, Claire Aguilar, Jan Krawitz, Kristine Samuelson, Sam Green, Stanley Nelson, Rena Kosersky, Jon Else, Bill Nichols, Dale Nelson, Debra Kozee, Pat Aufderheide, and Peter Jaszi.

What do filmmakers need to know when documenting a world filled with rights-protected images and sounds? How do they protect their own creative efforts from infringement? Where do they go for affordable stills and footage? How do filmmakers, historians, and the public evaluate the historical value of archival materials? Archival Storytelling defines key terms--copyright, fair use, public domain, orphan works and more—and challenges filmmakers to become not only archival users but also archival and copyright activists, ensuring their ongoing ability as creators to draw on the cultural materials that surround them.

Unlike the 1930s, when the United States tragically failed to open its doors to Europeans fleeing Nazism, the country admitted over three million refugees during the Cold War. This dramatic reversal gave rise to intense political and cultural battles, pitting refugee advocates against determined opponents who at times successfully slowed admissions. The first comprehensive historical exploration of American refugee affairs from the midcentury to the present, Americans at the Gate explores the reasons behind the remarkable changes to American refugee policy, laws, and programs.

Carl Bon Tempo looks at the Hungarian, Cuban, and Indochinese refugee crises, and he examines major pieces of legislation, including the Refugee Relief Act and the 1980 Refugee Act. He argues that the American commitment to refugees in the post-1945 era occurred not just because of foreign policy imperatives during the Cold War, but also because of particular domestic developments within the United States such as the Red Scare, the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of the Right, and partisan electoral politics. Using a wide variety of sources and documents, Americans at the Gate considers policy and law developments in connection with the organization and administration of refugee programs.

During the First World War, the French army deployed more than 500,000 colonial subjects to European battlefields. The struggle against a common enemy associated these soldiers with the French nation, but racial and cultural differences left them on the outside. This study investigates French conceptions of race and national identity at the time as reflected in the attitudes and policies directed toward these soldiers.

How far did French egalitarianism extend in welcoming and disciplining nonwhite troops? Using the experiences of African and Asian colonial soldiers, Richard S. Fogarty examines how tensions between racial prejudices and strong traditions of republican universalism and egalitarianism resulted in often contradictory and paradoxical policies. Employing a socially and culturally integrated approach to the history of warfare that connects military and political policies with the society and culture in which they developed, Fogarty presents a fresh picture of how the French came to deal with race relations, religious differences, and French identity itself.

The Medieval Church taught that marriage was indissoluble and that consent was the key. Why then could a marriage be dissolved by one spouse joining a religious order after an exchange of consent but before consummation? This question vexed Thirteenth-century academics and, in the fourteenth century, Pope John XXII asked a group of leading theologians and lawyers to study the issue. Position-papers were produced to explain the exception to the rule of indissolubility for chaste monks and nuns, and to explore whether the pope had the power to extend it to celibate priests and deacons. These texts, edited here, were used by John XXII to draft his bull Antique Concertationi (1322). This study reconstructs the story behind the constitution, providing a unique insight into the decision-making process at the Roman curia in Avignon under a controversial pope.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the proliferation of movies attracted not only the attention of audiences across America but also the apprehensive eyes of government officials and special interest groups concerned about the messages disseminated by the silver screen. Between 1907 and 1926, seven states―New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Kansas, Maryland, and Massachusetts―and more than one hundred cities authorized censors to suppress all images and messages considered inappropriate for American audiences. Movie studios, hoping to avoid problems with state censors, worrying that censorship might be extended to the federal level, and facing increased pressure from religious groups, also jumped into the censoring business, restraining content through the adoption of the self-censoring Production Code, also known as the Hays code.But some industry outsiders, independent distributors who believed that movies deserved the free speech protections of the First Amendment, brought legal challenges to censorship at the state and local levels. Freedom of the Screen chronicles both the evolution of judicial attitudes toward film restriction and the plight of the individuals who fought for the right to deliver provocative and relevant movies to American audiences. The path to cinematic freedom was marked with both achievements and roadblocks, from the establishment of the Production Code Administration, which effectively eradicated political films after 1934, to the landmark cases over films such as The Miracle (1948), La ronde (1950), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1955) that paved the way for increased freedom of expression. As the fight against censorship progressed case by case through state courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, legal authorities and the public responded, growing increasingly sympathetic toward artistic freedom. Because a small, unorganized group of independent film distributors and exhibitors in mid-twentieth-century America fought back against what they believed was the unconstitutional prior restraint of motion pictures, film after 1965 was able to follow a new path, maturing into an artistic medium for the communication of ideas, however controversial. Government censors would no longer control the content of America's movie screens. Laura Wittern-Keller's use of previously unexplored archival material and interviews with key figures earned her the researcher of the year award from the New York State Board of Regents and the New York State Archives Partnership Trust. Her exhaustive work is the first to discuss more than five decades of film censorship battles that rose from state and local courtrooms to become issues of national debate and significance. A compendium of judicial action in the film industry, Freedom of the Screen is a tribute to those who fought for the constitutional right of free expression and paved the way for the variety of films that appear in cinemas today.

It was only a forty-minute foreign film, but it sparked a legal confrontation that has left its mark on America for more than half a century. Roberto Rossellini's Il Miracolo (The Miracle) is deceptively simple: a demented peasant woman is seduced by a stranger she believes to be Saint Joseph, is socially ostracized for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, but is finally redeemed through motherhood.

Although initially approved by state censors for screening in New York, the film was attacked as sacrilegious by the Catholic establishment, which convinced state officials to revoke distributor Joseph Burstyn's license. In response, Burstyn fought back through the courts and won.

Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond Haberski show how the Supreme Court's unanimous 1952 ruling in Burstyn's favor sparked a chain of litigation that eventually brought filmmaking under the protective umbrella of the First Amendment, overturning its long-outdated decision in Mutual v. Ohio (1915). Their story features a more formidable cast than did the film itself, with the charismatic Francis Cardinal Spellman decrying the film as a Communist plot, while outspoken film critic Bosley Crowther vigorously advocated "freedom of the screen." Meanwhile, movie producers stood by silently for fear of alienating the Church and its large movie-going membership, leaving Burstyn to muster his own defense.

More than the inside story of one case, this book explores the unique place that the movies occupy in American culture and the way that culture continues to be shaped by anxiety over the social power of movies. The Burstyn decision weakened the ability of state censorship boards and the Catholic Church to influence the types of films Americans were allowed to see. Consequently, the case signaled the rise of a new era in which films would be more mature and more controversial than ever before.

Focusing on this single most important case in the jurisprudence surrounding motion picture expression, Wittern-Keller and Haberski add a significant new dimension to the story of cinema, censorship, and the history of First Amendment protections.

Richard
F.
Hamm
University of Virginia Press, 2003
In 1868 a scion of one of the leading families of Richmond, Virginia, ambushed and killed the city’s most controversial journalist over an article that had dishonored the killer’s family. In 1892 a Democratic politician killed a crusading Danville minister after a dispute at the polls. In 1907 a former judge shot to death the son of the Nelson County sheriff for an alleged rape, and in 1935 an Appalachian schoolteacher stood accused of killing her father by beating him with a shoe. All of these killers stood trial; two were convicted and two were acquitted. These cases attracted extensive press coverage, and journalists became not only recorders of the stories but integral parts of them, constructing the meaning of the events as they occurred and blurring the lines between reporter and reported.

Journalists from outside the state in their coverage of these cases provoked Virginians, and especially the press, to explain the interaction of their social values and legal system. In Murder, Honor, and Law, Richard F. Hamm explores the contrasts between how and to what effect national, particularly northern, newspapers perceived and portrayed Virginia law and custom versus how local papers covered the same events. In each of the cases Hamm shows the interplay of national media and culture with southern law, values, and culture and highlights how newspapers accepted, produced, altered, and disseminated ideas of southern exceptionalism, especially ideas about honor and chivalry. By focusing on the evolving press coverage of a number of crimes and trials over seventy years, Hamm illuminates the shift in southerners’ defenses against northern criticism from a position of pride in a society in which honor could trump law to claims that the South was just as law-abiding as the rest of the nation. He thus illustrates some key aspects for transformations of southern exceptionalism.

The debate over the poverty of Christ and his apostles under Pope John XXII (1316-1334) is one of the most famous intellectual controversies of the Middle Ages. The story of the uncompromising pope on collision course with a united Franciscan Order has often been told, most memorably by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose. In this book, Patrick Nold sets out to investigate the Franciscan Cardinal Bertrand de la Tour, a man apparently torn between the pope who was his patron and the Order to which he had devoted his life.

SCHOOL: The Story of American Public Education is a four-hour documentary series that chronicles the development of the United States’ public education system from the late 1770s to the 21st century. Produced by Stone Lantern Films, and presented by KCET/Hollywood, SCHOOL (narrated by Academy Award-winner Meryl Streep) recaptures the idealism of the early proponents of public education and continues with an unflinching look at the experiments and challenges that contribute to the climate in the classroom today

Ten years in the making, SCHOOL journeys through history and across the nation, weaving archival footage, on-site coverage, rare interviews and expert commentary into an unprecedented portrait of America's great education experiment. Designed to place today's issues into historical context, SCHOOL takes viewers on a 200-year journey, from colonial times to the present, in four chronological episodes. Throughout the series are interviews with witnesses, both famous and relatively unknown, who play key roles in public education's dramatic story. Leading experts in education history also lend their insights to each episode of SCHOOL. Episode 1 - The Common School (1770 - 1890) Episode 2 - As American As Public School (1900 - 1950) Episode 3 - Equality (1950 - 1980) Episode 4 - The Bottom Line (1980 - the present).

A companion book based on the series was published in 2002 by Beacon Press.

Rarely are we privileged to see the making of a saint, but it is just what this book gives us for John of Kronstadt (1829–1908), a major figure in the religious life of Late Imperial Russia. So popular was Father John during his years of ministry that Kronstadt became a pilgrimage site replete with peddlers selling souvenir photographs, postcards, and commemorative mugs.

A Prodigal Saint follows Father John’s development from activist priest to venerated spiritual leader and, after his death, to his elevation to sainthood in 1990. We see both the inner life of an aspiring saint and the symbiotic relationship between a living icon and his followers.

Father John represented a fundamentally new type of religious behavior and a new standard of sanctity in Late Imperial Russia. He ministered to the poor of Kronstadt, creating shelters and employment programs and participating in the temperance movement. In the process he acquired a reputation for prayerful intercession that soon spread beyond Kronstadt. When he was asked to minister to the dying Alexander III in 1894, his fame became international as he attracted correspondents from the United States and Europe. In his later years he allied himself increasingly with the radical right, which has had momentous implications for the Russian Orthodox Church in the twentieth century.

Kizenko draws upon rich and virtually unknown documents from the Russian archives, including Father John’s diaries, thousands of letters he received from his followers, and the police reports on the sect that formed around him. John’s diaries are a truly unique source, for they document the making of a modern saint: his struggles with doubt, his ascetic practices, and his growing realization that others saw him as a saint. Kizenko explores the extent to which Father John collaborated in the formation of his own cult and how he himself was influenced by the expectations and desires of his audience. In the final chapter she follows Father John’s posthumous reputation (and the struggles over how to use that reputation) in Russia, the Soviet Union, and throughout the world. A Prodigal Saint is published in collaboration with the Harriman Institute at Columbia University as part of its Studies of the Harriman Institute series. It is a pioneering study that contributes to our understanding of lived religion, saints’ cults, and modern Russian history.

Allen
B.
Ballard
Simon & Schuster, 2000
Where I'm Bound," a stunning and engaging Civil War novel, is the first work of fiction to focus solely on the soldiers of an African-American regiment. Throughout the war, more than 180,000 African-American men fought for the Union Army. Many were escaped slaves, others were freed men; yet all voluntarily enlisted for one cause: freedom. For the first time in fiction, their experiences are successfully portrayed in a manner befitting the grandeur and scope of their contributions. Inspired by the true story of a black cavalry unit in Mississippi, renowned African-American historian Allen Ballard weaves factual events with the fictional account of an escaped slave, Joe Duckett, who flees to join the Northern Army. When Duckett escapes his life of bondage to become a cavalry scout, he grows to be more than a free man -- he becomes a hero. Duckett and his hard-riding regiment roam the Mississippi Delta, freeing slaves and keeping vital waterways open for the Union. As the war approaches its final, tragic days, Duckett embarks on his most dangerous mission yet: to return to the plantation from which he escaped in order to reunite with his wife and daughter. More than just an account of the Civil War, "Where I'm Bound" is an affecting portrayal of the psychological effects of war. Through the character Duckett, some of war's greatest tragedies are painfully evoked -- the agonizing separation from family, the horrendous mission of having to kill another man, and the cruelty and moral corruption that occur when men's passions are their greatest weapons against one another. This story of one man's ability to meet such overwhelming challenges brings to life the noble fight forfreedom as displayed by African-American soldiers as well as the effects of that fight on an entire country and culture. Dr. Ballard's first work of fiction is a striking blend of historical fact and dramatic storytelling brilliantly illustrating the accomplishments of African-American Civil War soldiers. "Where I'm Bound" is destined to become a classic novel of the Civil War.

An exuberant and inspiring look at a century of African-American arts, I’ll Make Me a World … celebrates the extraordinary achievements of 20th century African-American writers, dancers, painters, actors, musicians and other artists. Six episodes engage viewers in compelling stories of struggle and creativity, featuring the sounds of jazz, blues, soul and rap that the world identifies as America’s music, poetry and fiction that challenge ideas of race and ideals of democracy, images that capture our conflicts and our common ties, and dance, theatrical performances and movies that have thrilled and inspired a century of audiences. (Text from the 1999 Peabody Awards)

Berger and White focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, tracing women's history from earliest times to the present. By exploring their place in social, economic, political, and religious life, the authors highlight the changing societal position of women through shifts over time in ideas about gender and the connections between women's public and private spheres.&nbsp;

Richard Hamm examines prohibitionists' struggle
for reform from the late nineteenth century to their great victory in securing
passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Because the prohibition movement was a
quintessential reform effort, Hamm uses it as a case study to advance a general
theory about the interaction between reformers and the state during the Gilded
Age and Progressive Era. Most scholarship on prohibition focuses on its social
context, but Hamm explores how the regulation of commerce and the federal tax
structure molded the drys' crusade. Federalism gave the drys a restricted
setting--individual states--as a proving ground for their proposals. But
federal policies precipitated a series of crises in the states that the drys
strove to overcome. According to Hamm, interaction with the federal government
system helped to reshape prohibitionists' legal culture--that is, their ideas
about what law was and how it could be used.

Iris
Berger
Indiana University Press, 1992
Virtually ignored by labor historians are the black and white women in South African industries. Drawing on comparative labor history and feminist theory, this important study traces the history of women as industrial workers and trade unionists in South Africa during most of the twentieth century.

The concept of generation as a historical category has never been used more effectively than in Lost Comrades. The socialists of the Front Generation, young men in 1914, were driven into political activity and ideological exploration by the experience of the First World War. Their efforts to renew socialism, to carry it beyond Marxism and beyond the working class, were profound and original, yet ultimately they failed.

Lost Comrades follows the Front Generation socialists from their questioning of Marxist orthodoxies in the 1920s into their confrontations with the twin challenges of fascism and world depression in the early 1930s. Responding to these dangers, they devised—with little success—counterpropaganda against the fascists and planning blueprints for the economy. Eventually, some of the most prominent—Sir Oswald Mosley in Britain, Hendrik de Man in Belgium, Marcel Déat in France—shifted their hopes to fascism or, dur- ing the Second World War, to collaborationism in Hitler's Europe. Others, however, like Carlo Mierendorff and Theodor Haubach in Germany, ended as martyrs in the anti-Nazi resistance. Yet even these divergent paths showed parallels reflecting their common starting point.

In tracing these unfulfilled careers, White brings a new clarity to the hopes and limitations of European socialism between the two world wars.

Long-neglected as a topic of study by sociologists, historians, and economists, the status of women in Africa is here examined by a group of well-known Africanists. Raising questions about the relationship of gender stratification to class formation, this compilation of essays focuses on such issues as the relationship of female solidarity to class consciousness, politics and female class action, rural-urban differences in gender stratification, and the impact of variations in socioeconomic structure on women and class formation.

One More Day's Journey chronicles the movement of African Americans from South Carolina to Philadelphia during the Great Migration. Alex Haley said, "It is informative and emotionally moving, and I recommend it." Ralph Ellison said, " I recommend it highly to all who would add to their knowledge of American History."

The Education of Black Folk chronicles the history of African-American education and the beginnings of affirmative action in American colleges and universities. Considered to be a classic by many, on can find no better introduction to this important topic.

The concept of generation as a historical category has never been used more effectively than in Lost Comrades. The socialists of the Front Generation, young men in 1914, were driven into political activity and ideological exploration by the experience of the First World War. Their efforts to renew socialism, to carry it beyond Marxism and beyond the working class, were profound and original, yet ultimately they failed.

Lost Comrades follows the Front Generation socialists from their questioning of Marxist orthodoxies in the 1920s into their confrontations with the twin challenges of fascism and world depression in the early 1930s. Responding to these dangers, they devised—with little success—counterpropaganda against the fascists and planning blueprints for the economy. Eventually, some of the most prominent—Sir Oswald Mosley in Britain, Hendrik de Man in Belgium, Marcel Déat in France—shifted their hopes to fascism or, dur- ing the Second World War, to collaborationism in Hitler's Europe. Others, however, like Carlo Mierendorff and Theodor Haubach in Germany, ended as martyrs in the anti-Nazi resistance. Yet even these divergent paths showed parallels reflecting their common starting point.

In tracing these unfulfilled careers, White brings a new clarity to the hopes and limitations of European socialism between the two world wars.

The founding of la Villa Rica de la Veracruz (the rich town of the True Cross) is prominently mentioned in histories of the conquest of Mexico, but scant primary documentation of the provocative act exists. During a research session at the Spanish archives, when John Schwaller discovered an early-sixteenth-century letter from Veracruz signed by the members of Cortés’s company, he knew he had found a trove of historical details. Providing an accessible, accurate translation of this pivotal correspondence, along with in-depth examinations of its context and significance, The First Letter from New Spain gives all readers access to the first document written from the mainland of North America by any European, and the only surviving original document from the first months of the conquest.

The timing of Cortés’s Good Friday landing, immediately before the initial assault on the Aztec Empire, enhances the significance of this work. Though the expedition was conducted under the authority of Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba, the letter reflects an attempt to break ties with Velázquez and form a strategic alliance with Carlos V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. Brimming with details about the events surrounding Veracruz’s inception and accompanied by mini-biographies of 318 signers of the document—socially competitive men who risked charges of treason by renouncing Velázquez—The First Letter from New Spain gives evidence of entrepreneurship and other overlooked traits that fueled the conquest.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century Byzantium was still one of the most influential states in the eastern Mediterranean, possessing two-thirds of the Balkans and almost half of Asia Minor. After the capture of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, the most prominent and successful of the Greek rump states was the Empire of Nicaea, which managed to re-capture the city in 1261 and restore Byzantium. The Nicaean Empire, like Byzantium of the Komnenoi and Angeloi of the twelfth century, went on to gain dominant influence over the Seljukid Sultanate of Rum in the 1250s. However, the decline of the Seljuk power, the continuing migration of Turks from the east, and what effectively amounted to a lack of Mongol interest in western Anatolia, allowed the creation of powerful Turkish nomadic confederations in the frontier regions facing Byzantium. By 1304, the nomadic Turks had broken Byzantium's eastern defences; the Empire lost its Asian territories forever, and Constantinople became the most eastern outpost of Byzantium. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Empire was a tiny, second-ranking Balkan state, whose lands were often disputed between the Bulgarians, the Serbs, and the Franks.

Using Greek, Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman sources, Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century presents a new interpretation of the Nicaean Empire and highlights the evidence for its wealth and power. It explains the importance of the relations between the Byzantines and the Seljuks and the Mongols, revealing how the Byzantines adapted to the new and complex situation that emerged in the second half of the thirteenth century. Finally, it turns to the Empire's Anatolian frontiers and the emergence of the Turkish confederations, the biggest challenge that the Byzantines faced in the thirteenth century.

One of the largest estuaries on the North Atlantic coast, Narragansett Bay served as a gateway for colonial expansion in the seventeenth century and the birthplace of American industrialization in the late eighteenth. Christopher Pastore presents an environmental history of this watery corner of the Atlantic world, beginning with the first European settlement in 1636 and ending with the dissolution of the Blackstone Canal Company in 1849. Between Land and Sea traces how the Bay’s complex ecology shaped the contours of European habitation, trade, and resource use, and how littoral settlers in turn reconfigured the physical and cultural boundaries between humans and nature.

Narragansett Bay emerges in Pastore’s account as much more than a geological formation. Rather, he reimagines the nexus of land and sea as a brackish borderland shaped by the tension between what English settlers saw as improvable land and the perpetual forces of the North Atlantic Ocean. By draining swamps, damming rivers, and digging canals, settlers transformed a marshy coastal margin into a clearly defined edge. The resultant “coastline” proved less resilient, less able to absorb the blows of human initiative and natural variation than the soggy fractal of water and earth it replaced.

Today, as sea levels rise and superstorms batter coasts with increasing ferocity, Between Land and Sea calls on the environmentally-minded to make a space in their notions of progress for impermanence and uncertainty in the natural world.

Americans have never been more concerned about their food's purity. The organic trade association claims that three-quarters of all consumers buy organic foods each year, spending billions of dollars.

"Dairy farm families, health officials, and food manufacturers have simultaneously stoked human desires for an all-natural product and intervened to ensure milk's safety and profitability," writes Kendra Smith-Howard. In Pure and Modern Milk, she tells the history of a nearly universal consumer product, and sheds light on America's food industry. Today, she notes, milk reaches supermarkets in an entirely different state than it had at its creation. Cows march into milking parlors, where tubes are attached to their teats, and the product of their lactation is mechanically pumped into tanks. Enormous, expensive machines pasteurize it, fortify it with vitamins, remove fat, and store it at government-regulated temperatures. It reaches consumers in a host of forms: as fluid milk, butter, ice cream, and in apparently non-dairy foods such as whey solids or milk proteins. Smith-Howard examines the cultural, political, and social context, discussing the attempts to reform the production and distribution of this once-perilous product in the Progressive Era, the history of butter between the world wars, dairy waste at mid-century, and the postwar landscape of mass production. She asks how milk could be conceptualized as a "natural" product, even as it has been incorporated into Cheez Whiz and wood glue. And she shows how consumer's changing expectations have had repercussions back down the chain, affecting farmers, cows, and rural landscapes.

A groundbreaking, interdisciplinary history, this book reveals the complexity and challenges of humanity's dependence on other species.